<p>Annasdad, you continue to demand EVIDENCE in BIG BOLD LETTERS but continue to ignore the same request for evidence to support your opinion.</p>
<p>annasdad - what are you offering, emperical evidence? What is your evidence in saying UIUC is worth more than whatever that low stats college, and NU is not worth more than UIUC? Show me some evidence, or is that your opinion. Of course, your opinion must be right.</p>
<p>
I hesitate to get involved in this battle of the anecdotes, but I can’t resist. Not certain I fully disagree, and I am impressed by elite degrees. But I assure you there are also a lot of people for whom it makes little difference, and even some who have a reflexive (possibly unfairly stereotypical) dislike of elite school grads.</p>
<p>Just look at the debate on this site. I’d bet there are several posters here who wouldn’t bend over to pick up an Ivy League application if it had a hundred dollar bill stapled to it. And I’d say the demographics here are fairly Ivy friendly compared to the rest of the country.</p>
<p>And just statistically, there are thousands of jobs in this country where no Ivy grads even apply, and hence there’s little opportunity to be dazzled by their credentials. We’ve been hiring a lot lately and I don’t think we’ve had any Ivy appicants for engineers (a couple from CIT), maybe some for analysts.</p>
<p>Around here, occasional recruited athletes get into Ivies (including HYP) or top LAC’s but not PSU Schreyer or Pitt honors. This really rankles both non-athletes who are excellent students AND athletes who are also excellent students.</p>
<p>Razzyreb:</p>
<p>Back to your post No. 146. It sounds like your daughter should have wonderful choices and that she really cannot go wrong. Every college she is considering will offer her an excellent education, so if we were in that situation, I would be looking at probable majors and how strong particular departments are in that major along with distance and weather. </p>
<p>All of the Ivy’s are going to have bad weather, but that is not a great reason to eliminate them. We studied inside back in the day. 
Duke is a tremendous university but I don’t know about its physics department specifically. I suspect the weather there would be the best. Davidson has grown in reputation over the years. It was not especially notable back when I was applying in the stone age, but appears to have moved way up. While the rankings are not necessarily trustworthy, presumably there is some reason behind the rankings. I am sure that if your daughter chose to go there, she would receive a fine education, and if she did well there, would find opportunities after graduation.</p>
<p>I think that kids should chose the college that suits them best, not necessarily go for the one that they think has the highest “prestige.” Who cares whether one’s acquaintances have heard of a particular school? What counts is whether graduate schools, professional schools, or high level employers have some idea of the merits of the school. Educated people tend to have heard of most of the best colleges and universities. Less educated people tend to know schools in their regions.</p>
<p>Your daughter should have terrific choices. Either research the best physics dept. among those choices, or throw a dart at the list. She should do very well either way.</p>
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</p>
<p>I have asked you four times to provide evidence to support your assertion that NU (and it’s ilk) provide a higher quality education than do UIUC (and it’s ilk). If you have evidence, why not simply present it?</p>
<p>Is UIUC your daughter’s top choice now?</p>
<p>jym has also asked you numerous times, why don’t you answer her?</p>
<p>"It’s plain and simple: an Ivy student is already vetted by virtue of graduating from a challenging school and by having beat out some 20,000 other people for the spot to begin with. So employers who hire an Ivy grad feel they have a better chance of hiring a smart, hard-working person than if they hire a no-name/lower-ranked school grad. "</p>
<p>How is that one bit differentiated from any other top school? Your argument is that (say) the Dartmouth applicant has the “smart stamp” on his passport because Dartmouth is an Ivy, but the Duke student doesn’t because it’s not an Ivy. That has no relationship to any kind of reality. Both D and D offer equally strong “smart stamps” and it JUST SO HAPPENS that Dartmouth belongs to the Ivy conference.</p>
<p>AD-
you took applejack’s quote in # 237 posted to you out of context. What he/she said was
</p>
<p>“I’d also question why anyone would send their kid to a Northwestern with a COA approaching $60K when an equivalent education can be had at UIUC for less than half that.”</p>
<p>Because I can, without breaking a sweat. Don’t like how I spend my money? Oh well. </p>
<p>Your resentment to people who have choices you don’t is quite telling.</p>
<p>The problem here is that annasdad really doesn’t know what he is asking for. He thinks by badgering people, it would some how make him sound like he is making a point. He needs to define “in his view” what are measurements of “better quality education.” Is it gaining entrance to graduate schools, employment, better critical thinking, better network, writing a better paper, better ethics, more research…Everyone has their own definition of what a good quality of education is. </p>
<p>When annasdad made the comparison between UIUC and the other low stats school, he used the test scores to support his judgement. But when making a comparison between UIUC and NU, the same criteria was not valid in his eyes. So which is it? Are test scores/GPA (reflection of credential of students) valid measurement of quality of education (presumably that’s why he is saying one school is worth more than another) or not?</p>
<p>Instead of using info categorizing students at the beginning of their college education (SAT scores), why not using information categorizing them at the end ( % of students receiving Phd’s) ?</p>
<p>Did anyone else notice that the math scores were not that different between NU and UIUC? It seemed to me that the big difference was in the CR and W scores, and even there, I could see overlap. </p>
<p>Anyway, at some income levels the elite school is actually LESS expensive than the state flagship. </p>
<p>At other levels, and for some students, the elite school provides a better social fit and is not prohibitively expensive, although it does seem that as these schools get more expensive and not that many seem in a rush to match HYP aid policies, increasing numbers of people who used to consider themselves “upper-middle class” are being priced out of most of these schools unless (at schools where this is possible) they reach levels much higher than students from other income brackets and get merit scholarships.</p>
<p>By using % of students receiving Phds may not be a good measurement, especially now it is students who can’t find jobs after UG that are continuing with their education.</p>
<p>"Twas your fifth opportunity to provide evidence to back up your assertion and your fifth obfuscation. "</p>
<p>oh my annasdad,
do you think you are the boss here? you certainly are acting like you think you are- making demands, asking for evidence while providing no proof of your own.
Got news for you… those kind of posts will get you nowhere on this forum. There are plenty of experienced parents whose will not be bullied and can and will challenge any preconceived, erroneous notion you have latched onto in your effort to always be “right”.</p>
<p>"By using % of students receiving Phds may not be a good measurement, especially now it is students who can’t find jobs after UG that are continuing with their education. "
I’m guessing she meant students who have completed a Phd, which is not easy to do.</p>
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</p>
<p>Fair question. I’ll answer it by starting with a passage from “Academically Adrift”:</p>
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</p>
<p>(from the excerpt at [Excerpt</a> from Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa](<a href=“Excerpt from Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa”>Excerpt from Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa))</p>
<p>I’ll go with those criteria as my definition of the quality of education - the best education is one that improves the student’s abilities in “communication, critical thinking, and problem solving.” (Note that I dropped the “written” adjective, making my proposed definition a bit broader than that in the quote.)</p>
<p>And I’ll continue with a reference to “Academically Adrift” (not quoting exactly here because the text isn’t in front of me and it’s not included in the online excerpt): based on the gains in critical thinking measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, there was a difference shown that was attributable to the institution the student attended. However: the difference accounted for by what students did when they got to college (time spent studying alone, rigor of courses taken, interactions with faculty members outside the classroom) far dwarfed the variation accountable for by the different institutions.</p>
<p>In other words: what you do when you get to college is far more important for the quality of your education than is the college you go to.</p>
<p>Now, oldfort, I’ve provided evidence for my assertions. I’m not claiming that it is dispositive - but at least it’s evidence with research to back it up. Now waiting for yours.</p>
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<p>You know, oldfort, you and PizzaGirl may be the champions of CC at creating straw men, then destroying them.</p>
<p>I assume your reference is to my comments a week or two ago regarding Lincoln College. First of all, I never compared it to UIUC. Second, I never commented on the quality of the education there. My comments were directed at why a parent would want to pay $37,000 to send an academically high-risk kid to a private school when the kid could go to a **community college<a href=“not%20UIUC”>/b</a> for a lot less money.</p>
<p>Straw man up - straw man down.</p>
<p>Yes I did mean students who had received Phd, something that is actually measured, not just students who were attending graduate school.</p>
<p>Bottom line, annasdad – the amount of money you can afford to send your undoubtedly bright daughter to college is the only good and proper amount. Any amount above that, must just be conspicuous consumption or a poor value for the money. </p>
<p>Similarly, wherever your daughter gets in will magically provide the best quality education. Any places she doesn’t get into, or that is ranked / rated higher on some dimension – well, it can’t be worth it, it’s all just meaningless. </p>
<p>You are extremely defensive about your life situation and choices. Heaven forbid you acknowledge that there are colleges out there that offer superior opportunities that you won’t be able to afford. There’s no shame in not being able to afford stuff – but don’t make a moral virtue out of it.</p>
<p>UIUC has an outstanding engineering school - maybe that is why the math scores, but not the verbal scores are similar to those of Northwestern.</p>